Introduction

In the past, almost all the empirical studies carried out under the banner of social anthropology were conducted by men and women who were citizens of industrial nations and whose focus of inquiry was the social life of communities with techniques simpler than their own. Even today, most anthropological fieldwork is of this kind. The phenomenon of indigenous anthropology in non-Western countries, and particularly in countries of the Third World, therefore poses two obvious questions. First, how, if at all, is the process of inquiry altered when anthropologists and other social scientists study people who are more like themselves or who at least belong to the same nation as themselves? And second, does the process change which therefore provides the financial, logistic and professional infrastructure for his inquiry, is poor and newly independent rather than affluent and with a long history of political and intellectual autonomy?